A Note from Neale...

My dear friends...

Conversations with God tells us that we are three-part beings, made up of Body, Mind, and Soul. In the weeks ahead here in the Bulletin, I would like to explore together the pathway to the Soul, because I get many questions about the Soul, and how to "get there."

I'll begin by asserting that the way to the Soul is the way out of the Mind. The Soul and the Mind do not exist in the same place. They can move hand-in-hand, so to speak; they can operate co-jointly — but they do not occupy the same space. They are not one and the same, nor should they be thought of as identical. The Mind is one thing, the Soul is quite another. Both have a purpose and a function in the human experience.

The problem with Life is that we do not understand it. And that it why it has become so problematical.

Very little in Life is working the way it should be working, do you know that? I mean, it wasn't meant to be this disruptive, this disjointed, this disappointing. It was never intended to be this difficult or this injurious or this challenging.

That having been said, all of Life is challenging at the outset, for every emerging species, because all species spend all of their early developmental moments trying to figure things out, trying to "get" what's going on, trying to understand what it does not understand... the understanding of which would change everything.

We humans, however, have spent far too much time on this part of the evolutionary process. And when a species spends too much time in its earliest developmental phase, it runs the danger of never moving beyond that stage — for the principal reason that, operating from that extremely limited level of awareness, the species simply extinguishes itself by virtue of its own behaviors.

It does itself in. It extinguishes its particular Life Form. Not Life Itself, but Life in that specific form.

This is the danger facing us. We humans are an emerging species, let's make no mistake about that. Let's have no misunderstanding around this. Anyone who thinks that the Homo sapien is a highly evolved species need only look at our collective behaviors. They will be quickly disabused of that notion.

So let's be clear. We are in the earliest moments of our development, of our evolution. We are still trying to figure things out, still trying to understand what's going on here. And we are making one huge mistake as we search for answers: we are using our Mind as our principle investigative tool.

This is a huge mistake because the answers we seek will not be, and can never be, found in our Mind. What is tantalizing is that we can almost get there. We can almost understand. But we cannot fully perceive what we need to perceive in order to move the evolutionary process forward at anything other than the slowest pace.

And so we find ourselves at a virtual standstill. We have not made any major evolutionary advance now for several thousand years.

We still think we are separate from each other and from everything else.

We still think there is "not enough,” and that we have to struggle with each other in order to get "enough."

We still think we have to kill each other if we can't get "enough" by struggling with each other.

We still think, even after we get "enough," that we don't have "enough."

These are the thoughts of a beginning species, of a very primitive race. And these are the very thoughts that drive the engine of humanity's present experience — of our economics, of our politics, of our social systems of every kind, and yes, even of our religions.

These are the thoughts that we tell our offspring in the stories that we call "education." And the problem is that these are just that..."thoughts."

So long as we stick with our "thoughts" and call them "truth," we will remain a primitive species. So long as we insist on using our Mind as the chief tool of our investigations, we will be lost in the labyrinth, unable to find our way out of our own constructions. We will remain in a prison of our own devise.

What we need now is what philosopher/author Alan Sasha Lithman calls "a mutation of consciousness." And we'll talk more about that, and how we can achieve it, next week in this space.